DISINFORMATION LAWS AND THE CONCEPTS OF TRUTH 

Online Workshop

2 April 2025  |  12am - 1pm CET

Guest | Dr. Paolo Cavaliere, Senior Lecturer in digital media and IT law at the University of Edinburgh Law School, researching and teaching on freedom of expression, media law and digital rights

Paolo Cavaliere is going to present his paper The Truth in Fake News: How Disinformation Laws Are Reframing the Concepts of Truth and Accuracy on Digital Platforms. The European Union’s strategy to address the spread of disinformation, and most notably the Code of Practice on Disinformation and the Digital Services Act, tasks digital platforms with a range of actions to minimise the distribution of issuebased and political adverts that are verifiably false or misleading. We will discuss the implications of the EU’s approach with a focus on its categorical approach, specifically what it means to conceptualise disinformation as a form of advertisement and by what standards digital platforms are expected to assess the truthful or misleading nature of the content that they distribute because of this categorisation. The analysis will show how the emerging EU anti-disinformation framework marks a departure from the European Court of Human Rights’ consolidated standards of review for public interest and commercial speech and the tests utilised to assess their accuracy.

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Data, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Law & Society (DRAILS) is a CPDR - CRIDES research project